Born This Day
Surely there are cloudy Christmas Days, and snowy ones. And of course Christmas Eve lasts twenty-four hours, many of them in daylight. But in my mind Christmas Eve is always nighttime, and Christmas Day is always a sunny, sparkling morning. This is not to say I don’t have daytime memories of December twenty-fourths, running last minute errands, waiting for dark to fall so the lights and candles would become magical instead of barely visible, or evening memories of December twenty-fifths, quiet, sated, languid. I do, of course. Yet I’ve always known in some way truer than memory and more real than the laws of time, but just outside the realm of language, that Christmas Eve is night and Christmas Day is morning.
I can explain away this persistent skewed perception of mine. The big events of Christmas Eve—the church service, the ‘Happy Christmas to all and to all a goodnight”, the hanging of stockings, the anticipation of Santa’s visit—all take place at night. And the big events of Christmas Day—confirming Santa’s visit, emptying the stockings, and opening the gifts—all take place in the morning (at least in my family). So of course the one would be fused to night time in my consciousness; the other fused to morning. But this paradoxical sense of the two halves this holy day goes beyond my personal, middle-class, Protestant, North American upbringing.
We celebrate Christmas Day as the birth day of Jesus but our legends and songs place his birth in the night. Danish philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard put it this way in his Journal:
Unto you is born this day a Saviour—and yet is was night when he was born.
That is an eternal illustration: it must be night—and becomes day in the middle of the night when the Saviour is born.
What Kierkegaard calls the eternal illustration is one of the paradoxical core messages of Christmas. We hear a lot, this time of year, from justice-minded preachers, about the other paradox. About a savior infant. About the one called King of the Jews born in a stable. About power and might planted as seeds of potential in the most unlikely vessel. It's a message worth repeating. But so is the other paradox.
Unto you is born this day a Saviour—and yet it was night when he was born.
Jesus, the promised and long awaited king, didn’t arrive amidst peace and prosperity, on a sunny day of celebration, food and wine (that would happen much later in his story—and the triumph would not last). Instead he (according to the story as we hear it told and retold through scripture and song and verse) he arrived on the scene in the middle of the night, after a long journey, surrounded by animals. Yet his birth would be heralded by angels—born this day!
That’s the way it is with saviors, superheroes, heroines of all ages, races, genders, species. They appear not when all is calm and bright, not when things are going smoothly and everyone is well-fed, with adequate housing and clean water, access to affordable health care and quality education, treated with equal humanity under the systems of law and justice. No, saviors, superheroes, heroines of all ages, races, genders, species, appear in the metaphorical night when the systems are broken, food is scarce and inequitably distributed, water is tainted, education and health care available only to the privileged few. And then, as if in an instant but really after years of coalition building and conversation and demonstrations and more, night becomes day.
That second paradoxical message Christmas is as powerful and subversive as the first. The birth we celebrate with light and song and good cheer, that same birth we celebrate on Christmas morning, the story tells us, happened on Christmas Eve night. And though it probably wasn’t any time near the Winter Solstice, that night two millennia ago in Bethlehem of Judea, still the earth did shift at the moment of birth and night became day, darkness blazed.
Unto you is born this day a Saviour—and yet it was night when he was born.
A new born savior, night into day—heady, hope filled theological food for the spirit, yet the most generative and possibility-laden paradoxical message of Christmas, especially for years such as this, hinges on a single word: this.
Unto you, unto us, is born this day a Savior.
Our beloved Unitarian Universalist religious educator, Sophia Lyon Fahs, penned poem reminds us
For so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come—
Born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings
No prophets predict their future courses
No wise men see a star to show
where to find the babe that will save humankind
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers—sitting beside their children's cribs—
feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.
They ask, "Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?"
Each night a child is born is a holy night—
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshipping.
Each night a child is born is a holy night. And children are born every night. Every day. And thus, in our faith—and really, in so many faiths—unto us is born this day, today, December 25, 2022, a savior. And tomorrow. And a week from next Thursday. We may not recognize her. We may never hear his name. They may remain anonymous to all but the closest few. But they are born this day to save the world.
When Russia’s continued war on Ukraine is but one of many armed conflicts, coups, civil wars across the globe. When leaders of nations suspend constitutions. When life expectancies fall, due not just to disease but also suicide and drug overdoses. When separate but never equal is the covert guiding principle of policing, judicial systems, health care, education. When greed shouts down science and the planet itself cries out in pain. Then the hope, and yes, the joy, of Christmas lie in that subtle, transformational paradox: Christmas morning, the first Christmas morning, the real Christmas morning we are told, was long ago and far away; yet unto us is born this day a savior who will, along with all the other saviors, born all the other days, upend the order, bringing peace and justice to every far corner of this round earth.
And that’s glad tiding of great joy to the world.
Amen